Abstract

In his seminal work Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphart shows that, among other factors, power sharing enhances the quality of democracy. Lijphart’s analysis, however, suffers from a rather unsystematic and arbitrary choice of measures of democratic quality and from an implicit treatment of consensus democracy as a onedimensional concept. Our reanalysis aims at correcting for both. We make use of two new and unique datasets, the Democracy Barometer (DB) and the Consensus Democracy Indicators. Our results suggest that Lijphart is right, yet only in principle. Indeed, overall democratic quality seems to profit from power sharing. However, our findings lead to two important refinements of Lijphart’s democratic quality thesis. First, power sharing does not foster every aspect of the quality of democracy and, even worse, brings about low transparency. Second, the combination of consensus and majoritarian traits appears to matter. In particular, consensus-unitary democracies fare best – particularly if accompanied by consensual traits on the third consensus dimension that was not originally contemplated by Lijphart – and notably better than pure consensus democracies.